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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grants 0910838, 0910868 and 0910846. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Platys: from position to context

There is increasing recognition of the centrality of
delivering high-quality user experience
in networked applications. Conventional approaches to user experience tend to
equate it with network performance measures such as throughput and
latency.However, user experience
is more than just performance, and naturally incorporates considerations of
user context. Although a user’s context is inherently a high-level concern
centered on meaning, it turns out to depend crucially on low-level concerns
centered on devices and infrastructure, and poses challenges to network
architecture.Thus context is a
natural topic for cross-layer, indeed interdisciplinary, study—and consequently
is well aligned with the goals of the present solicitation.

This project considers elements of context that are
particularly related to mobile computing, and which can be exploited in many
applications. Because mobile devices are always with a user, they offer a great
opportunity for capturing some of the key aspects of context, namely, the
user's location or other characteristics of the user’s environment through what
is termed localization.In current practice, the user's
location is captured at the level of position,
i.e., geospatial (latitude-longitude) coordinates. What matters is the user’s place: a location in conceptual terms
such as “in a study group meeting,” “jogging,” or “grocery
shopping”—descriptions that combine a set of positions with the user’s activities,
properties of the user’s environment, and the activities of the users
surrounding or interacting with the user.

To realize such a notion of place requires that information
from devices and infrastructure flow in ways unanticipated in current network
architectures. In connection with collaboration, it involves ways to enable
opportunistic interactions while preserving the users’ privacy and designing
incentive mechanisms to ensure cooperation by all without exploitation of any.
These are inherently architectural concerns—they involve interconnections among
components. Yet they lie far beyond traditional network topics such as routing.